Harlem: Stories of Repression and Resistance Walk led by Asad Dandia
Thursday, October 9th 5:00 - 7:00pm
Please join us for a guided walk through Harlem to learn about the neighborhood’s role in the movement against systemic injustice, specifically, police violence.
Harlem: Stories of Repression and Resistance considers the history of repressive policing in the neighborhood and organizing in response. The walk will cover historical events from the 1930s to the present, visiting the sites of flashpoints such as: the 1935, 1943, 1957, and 1964 uprisings against and challenges to police brutality; the civil rights movement and the FBI’s Counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) aimed at its suppression; Black Power bookstores that doubled as Black activism hubs in the 1960s and 1970s; Mayor Rudi Giuliani-era aggressive enforcement policies like stop-and-frisk, which were guided by the conservative Manhattan Institute’s ’broken windows theory’; and the surveillance of Muslims especially post- 9/11. As such, the walk will give a deeper appreciation of not just oppressive structures but also the role of this urban village in advancing a people’s self-determination and social solidarity. Afterwards, there will be an opportunity for attendees to speak informally with the guide and each other over Somali chai. Register here.
Harlem: Stories of Repression and Resistance is part of CSSD's yearlong program Countering the Carceral State, which explores interconnections between the crises of disciplinary enforcement central to American power at home and abroad. The walk is co-sponsored by the Columbia Oral History MA Program and co-presented as part of their Thursday Evening Event Series, which in 2025-2026 explores the relationships between place, memory, and oral history through a series of site-specific oral history events.
Asad Dandia is a Brooklyn-born public historian, lecturer, and tour guide. As an undergraduate, he founded a mutual aid organization to feed his community, which was infiltrated by an NYPD informant, pushing him to join an ACLU-led lawsuit challenging police surveillance of NYC's Muslim communities. The lawsuit resulted in successful policy change that brought civil rights protections for all New Yorkers. Currently, he operates New York Narratives, a walking tour project that advances new perspectives on the city by highlighting erased, underrepresented, and forgotten community stories. He also lectures at CUNY and is a tour guide at the Museum of the City of New York. He holds a master's degree in Islamic Studies from Columbia University.
Location Details:
We will meet at the mural “From Harlem with Love: a Mural for Yuri and Malcolm” on West 125th Street & Old Broadway, New York, NY 10027
Directions: The 1 train to 125th street and walk over to the mural
Location Link: https://maps.app.goo.gl/otubSsMLaUnuamiC6?g_st=ipc.
In Defiance: Launch Party
An arts and culture celebration, inspired by the legacy of Malcolm X, was hosted by the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University at The Malcolm X & Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center to kick off the yearlong program Countering the Carceral State.
Inspired by Malcolm X's internationalist insights and in line with CSSD's thematic focus in 2025-2026 on crisis, the program explored interconnections between the crises of disciplinary enforcement central to American power at home and abroad. Program events probed continuities between policing, racial profiling, and police militarization; the prison industrial complex; immigrant detention; forever wars in the Middle East and Central Asia; and the transformation of war zones like Gaza into technological testbeds.
Event Overview
The event began at 5:30 PM on Friday, September 12th with some pre-event tour and opening drinks. The drinks reception was accompanied by a guided tour of the historic Malcolm X & Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center.
The tour was then followed by with framing remarks and a screening of a video essay, From the Ruins: A Prelude, by renowned scholar and curator Sohail Daulatzai (UC Irvine). From the Ruins: A Prelude is a reckoning with the histories of radical internationalism that Malcolm X demands and a portal into the tensions between the catastrophic and the quotidian, here and there, then and now.
The evening was capped off with an live concert featuring the acclaimed duo of Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith performing their album Defiant Life.
This event was co-sponsored by the Department of Music, and was in collaboration with the Institute for Research in African American Studies and the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department at Columbia University.
This Enemy Institution: (Black) Study and the Insurrection Imperative
Thursday, September 18 · 5:30 - 7:30pm EDT
Please join us for a guided discussion with pre-circulated readings led by Dr. Dylan Rodriguez on counterinsurgency.
This Enemy Institution is a guided discussion that explores how deep intellectual study can initiate insurrection against counterinsurgency in the 21st century.
When the regimes of civil/human rights, liberal freedom, (social) justice, and “humanity” ostensibly “fail,” the archive of Civilizational warfare expands. This is happening in real-time: there is an acceleration of counterinsurgency projects, formed in a contentious scramble across state and extra-state venues, incorporating universities, humanitarian and philanthropic organizations, and capitalized social justice movements. The deadly inadequacies and alleged institutional betrayals of rights/freedom/justice/humanitarian (and related) regimes thus indicate neither political failure nor systemic dysfunction—appraisals that indicate a reformist imperative—but instead reveal the expansion of a 21st century Counterinsurgency Machine. Logics of neutralization, extermination, discipline, and empowerment shape this ensemble, which targets anti-Civilizational streams of liberationist activity and thriving. To analyze and confront this machine is to coordinate, study, and strategically theorize an insurrection imperative.
Register for the discussion here.
Readings for the guided discussion will be circulated by email to event registrants. Afterwards, please join us for cookies, snacks, and refreshments in the church garden.
This Enemy Institution is the first event in the Center for the Study of Social Difference’s yearlong program Countering the Carceral State, which explores interconnections between the crises of disciplinary enforcement central to American power at home and abroad.
Dylan Rodríguez is a parent, teacher, scholar, organizer and collaborator. He is employed as a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Riverside where he has worked since 2001. Dylan was elected President of the American Studies Association in 2020-2021 and in 2020 was named to the inaugural class of Freedom Scholars. Since 2021, he has served as Co-Director of the Center for Ideas and Society, where he created the Decolonizing Humanism(?) programming stream. Since the late-1990s, Dylan has participated as a founding member of organizations like Critical Resistance, Abolition Collective, Critical Ethnic Studies Association, Cops Off Campus, Scholars for Social Justice, and the UCR Department of Black Study, among others. His most recent book is White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logic of Racial Genocide (Fordham University Press, 2021), which won the 2022 Frantz Fanon Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.
Reading List (links will be provided via email):
Robert L. Allen, “Personal Reflections on the Road to Black Awakening in Capitalist America,” p. 118-122. (5 pages)
Dylan Rodríguez, Forced Passages, Chapter 1, “Domestic War Zones and the Extremities of Power: Conceptualizing the U.S. Prison Regime,” p. 39-74. (35 pages)
Dylan Rodríguez, “On University Abolition,” pp. 367-374. (8 pages)
United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency (2018), “Executive Summary,” p. Ix-xxi. (12 pages)
The Heritage Foundation, Mandate for Leadership, 2025: The Conservative Promise, (a.k.a. “Project 2025”), 2023:
Kevin D. Roberts, “Foreword: A Promise to America,” p. 29-46;
“Section One: Taking the Reins of Government,” introduction, p. 47-49;
Lindsey M. Burke, “Ch. 11, Department of Education,” “Mission” and “Overview,” (25 pages)